Enthusiasms and expostulations, by Glenn Kenny

May 2013

May 30, 2013

I sometimes wonder the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz's Deli "I'll have what she's having" scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner's 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you'll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a classic for a reason; Meg Ryan's Sally hoists Billy Crystal's Harry by the petard of his own sexist presumption but good. But one reason the movie is as cozy a concoction as it is has to do with the fact that after the punchline, it never returns to the topic of female orgasm; the discomfort Harry feels after initially sleeping with Sally and then fleeing from her prior to the inevitable fateful facing of facts and return to romance has nothing to do with this particular facet of sexual or emotional exchange. Someone might expect, in the depiction of their growing intimacy, a query from the acceptably neurotic Harry along the lines of "how do I know you're not faking it with me?" But the viewer is left to presume that they've worked that all out. Actually, given the way the movie progresses to its conclusion, my feeling is that the filmmakers were/are hoping that you've pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The viewer is meant to feel pleasant feelings, not particularly complicated or uncomfortable or unpleasant ones.

This idea as it pertains to comedy, and to romantic comedy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the other (what they share in common is the view that pretty much all sexual relations are somehow predicated on hostility)—and it's also changing as it pertains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of representation remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depiction of sexuality on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as it ever has been. And critics, depending on their ideological perspective, direct and/or unique experience, or just plain contrarian pissiness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a given work dealing with this representation in sometimes wildly divergent ways.

In 1969, expressing what he characterized as his sole major disappointment in director Tony Richardson's adaptation of his novel Laughter In The Dark (whose female lead's name, Anna Karina, apparently amused him no end), Vladimir Nabokov said: "Theatrical acting, in the course of the last centuries, has led to incredible refinements of stylized pantomime in the representation of, say, a person eating, or getting deliciously drunk, or looking for his spectacles, or making a proposal of marriage. Not so in regard to the imitation of the sexual act which on the stage has absolutely no tradition behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have witnessed up to now on screen—the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet—all of it is primitive, commonplace, conventional and therefore disgusting. The lack of art and style in these paltry copulations is particularly brought into evidence by their clashing with the marvelously high level of acting in virtually all other imitations of natural gestures on our stage and screen. This is an attractive topic to ponder further, and directors should take notice of it." This was in an interview with Philip Oakes of the Sunday Times of London that ran on June 22 1969 and was of course reprinted in Strong Opinions, a compendium of interviews and essays and occasionals by Nabokov.

Since 1969, significant strides, one could say, have been made in the on-screen depiction of the sex act, although it would be useless to speculate as to whether they might have found favor with the notoriously particular Nabokov. Nudity is no longer so taboo, although the proscriptions regarding who may see nudity in films remain pretty strong. The simulation of sex acts has become more realistic via the use of prosthetics (see Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy, a droll behind-the-scenes look at the absurdity and awkwardness of a film set not unlike one of Breillat's own) and digital manipulation (by which means, say, an actress' body stocking can be handily erased). There is also a mild trend toward unsimulated sex. The sex in the early films of Joe Swanberg, while staged, is often not simulated. Martin Scorsese once said he didn't like nude scenes because they stopped a film's narrative dead; cinematic open-heart surgeon John Cassavetes also largely abjured them, perhaps for different reasons. In films such as those of Swanberg's, they are inextricable from the narrative. Although I continue to insist that the discomfort the scenes in Swanberg's films might cause in a viewer have little to do with Swanberg's intentions or motivations. (I continue to believe that Swanberg began his moviemaking efforts as a Joe Francis with a film-appreciation-class schtick under his belt, and that his current films are an attempt to live that unsavory fact down.) In matters sexual as depicted on screen, there's a continuing fascination with/desire for the real. Only it's not desired in the context of pornography, at least that's the party line. Pornography, no matter what it show us, isn't art. Pornography doesn't win Palmes d'Or, nor does it get its participants commended for their bravery. Pornography doesn't count. But why should it not?

II.

Here is a passage from "Big Red Son," David Foster Wallace's essay chronicling the Adult Video News Awards of 1998. The character of "Harold Hecuba" is in fact Evan Wright, who was a writer and editor at Hustler magazine at the time. Not to potentially alienate any of my younger readership by getting too "Losing My Edge" on them, I can confirm that Wallace, writing under a dual pseudonym, here sets down the story pretty much as Wright told it (maybe overselling the super-decent-guy aspects of the detective character just a teensy bit):

"Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.'s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.'s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box's return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective—60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy—was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was 'the faces,' i.e. the actresses' faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized 'fuck-me-I'm-a-nasty-girl' sneer and became, suddenly, real people. 'Sometimes—and you never know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sudden they'll kind of reveal themselves' was the detective's way of putting it. 'Their what-do-you-call...humanness.' It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors—sometimes very gifted actors—go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: 'In real movies, it's all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.'"

Below, although it is not in any way explicit, is an arguably "not safe for work" image of then-porn-performer Stephanie Swift in an early appearance, in a segment from a pornographic anthology feature, one of whose prime directives involves demonstrating the intensity of Ms. Swift's actual orgasms.

May 25, 2013

How did this forty-disc monster CG happen, you may wonder? (Then again, you may not wonder, in which case just skip ahead to the capsules.) Well, it’s like this: whilst working on the De Niro book I would take breaks
from the intensive De Niro watching by popping in a Blu-ray to “relax,” and
mostly they would be things that I’d had in the “staging area” for the Consumer
Guide anyway. Once the De Niro book was done, and I’d done another round of
revisions on The Novel That I Delusionally Expect Will Catupult Me Out Of This
Particular [redacted] Business, I had been hoping to get a few weeks work on
another actually remunerative project, but that DIDN’T HAPPEN. Also My Lovely
Wife has had to work late a lot. What’s a fella to do? Go to rep theaters?
Interact with OTHER PEOPLE? Hell no.

Commended by Andrew Sarris for his “stylistic conviction in
an intellectual vacuum,” Delmer Daves does in fact offer stronger, better stuff
than that, according to his post-Andrew champions. Dave Kehr has written
compellingly on his frequently dismissed melodramas, Susan Slade and Parrish,
particularly (“Call it Camp…”—Sarris) and in the booklet essays for this and
the also-superb Jubal, Kent Jones makes
the case that Daves was the master of a rare and particular kind of Western,
one in which the depiction of goodness was paramount (“or call it Corn,” Sarris
continued). Jones is compelling and well-informed, and his descriptions of
Daves’ technical innovations in shooting his uniquely American landscapes adds
persuasive ballast to his case for the director as a major one. But here it’s really the seeing that’s
believing. The simple-as-death storyline (adapted from an Elmore Leonard tale)
gets a beautifully measured treatment here; this is a far, far more substantial
film than its lazy movie-guide categorizations as a “solid B Western” or
whatever give it credit for, and the transfer of the black-and-white film is gorgeous.
Outtakes include still shots from an excised Felicia Farr nude scene. OK,
that’s not actually true. Extras are sparse but as I said the Jones essay is an
education. And I can’t emphasize enough that the movie is beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful, on pretty much every conceivable level. —A

Bakumatsu Taiyo Den
(Eureka!/Masters of Cinema region B U.K. import)

This 1957 picture ranked fifth in a 1999 poll of greatest
Japanese films conducted by the nearly hundred-year-old magazine Kinema Jumpo.
It’s relatively obscure in the west; the reasons for the high esteem there and
the scarcity of its reputation here are probably not unrelated; it’s a very
culturally specific film, an allegorical farce in which the dwindling of the shogunate in the mid-to-late 19th
century reflects upon the Japan of the time the film was released. The opening
montage, as it happens, has a lot in common with that of the veddy British On
Approval, reviewed below; taking the viewer
by the hand and saying this story is about “then,” but it’s also about now. So
what is it about, anyway? It
takes its time with that; the ostensible plot hook, in which a broke brothel
patron starts doing odd jobs around the joint because he can’t pay his bill,
doesn’t really kick in until about 45 minutes into the nearly two-hour film,
directed by Yuzo Kawashima and
co-written with his then protégé, the soon-to-be-great Shohei Imamura. The
movie is diverting for its picaresque humor, social observations, and overall
frankness (never not funny: when a bunch of the film’s male characters gang up
for a group piss); sometimes it comes off like a Moliere farce with a change of
venue. The disc boasts an excellent transfer of a recent digital restoration;
extras are confined to the disc package booklet, which has some essays. I’d
tend to recommend this most highly to viewers already very conversant with
Japanese film looking to catch up on what had been a hard-to-find canon
classic. —A

Band of Outsiders
(Criterion)

How audience friendly was this Godard film considered to be
back in 1964? Please note the Columbia Pictures logo between the “Visa de
controle Ministériel No. 28712” card and the opening title montage. Yep, with
its tack-piano theme, jokey credits, quirky tendresse, and more, this really is
the sort of film that represents to perpetually disillusioned one-time Godard
fans of a certain age what “earlier, funnier films” meant to the aliens
chastising Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories.
To such an extent that one almost is tempted to trash it, the better to extol
the virtues of Ici et aeilleurs.
OK, not really. Much. It’s wonderful, the race through the Louvre and the
much-bruited Madison bit are as great as everyone says they are, and in all
this is Godard’s most Queneau-esque film, not just with respect to Gallic
“charm” and all that, but also in terms of a structural self-consciousness
that’s designed to enhance genuine feeling rather than preclude it. In short, a
Great Film. This Blu-ray is a lovely upgrade of what had been an already
excellent package, the wintry black-and-white rendered in exceptional crispness
and detail. Even the booklet essay by Joshua Clover, quite possibly my least
favorite writer of all time (because I’m sure you were wondering) is better than all right. —A+

Black Sabbath (Arrow
region B U.K. import)

I think this anthology picture may be Mario Bava’s best
film, by virtue not only of its consistency but its variability. Alternatively
dead serious and irrepressibly playful, every shot a wonder and certain images
so hauntingly terrifying and sad as to be unforgettable, it’s a concise feast
of very particular cinematic inspiration. I speak of course of the Italian
language version of the 1963 film, entitled I tre volti di paura (The Three Faces of Fear), which retains the original order of the three
tales and has a final shot featuring “host” Boris Karloff that’s an utter
delight. That version is the highlight of this three-disc (one Blu-ray, two
standard def) edition of the film from Arrow. There’s also the English-language
American International cut, which gives us Karloff’s own voice, which is nice.
The most salient extra on the Blu-ray is a very good half-hour video with
split-screen explanations of the aural and visual differences between the two
versions. The picture quality of my favored version, from red telephone to
sickly green vampire family to grimacing jewelry-wearing corpse, is so
staggeringly great it brought tears to my eyes, almost. A definitive edition
and an intense pleasure. Wowsers. Co-starring Jean-Pierre Leaud’s mom, by the
way. —A+

Cloak and Dagger
(Olive)

I raised my eyebrows in an approving way when I saw the logo
of The Film Foundation on the back cover of this edition of the 1946 Fritz Lang
thriller. The restoration presented here looks pretty grand. A little damage in
the form of scratches and such is visible here and there, but overall this has
really superb picture quality with excellent contrast and detail. It’s a damn
fine film, too, boasting a solid Gary Cooper performance (whether you buy him
as a nuclear physicist really doesn’t matter after about six minutes or so) and
some very nice bits, including a a scene in which
attracted-to-each-other-awkwardly roommates have to contend with a hungry cat,
and a killing-in-self-defense scene that’s a definite precursor to the nasty
kitchen-murder sequence in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Check it out. —A

Crimewave (Shout!
Factory)

As the saying goes, films don’t get too much more maudit than this 1985 item.
Director Sam Raimi’s second proper feature, and the first that he and his
associates (Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, et. al.) made for/with THE MAN, was a behind-the-scenes tragedy/farce
from the get-go, from imposed leading man to unforeseen union overages to
clueless execs doing recuts that mutilated a plethora of elaborate and possibly
beautiful master shots and more. Surely an object lesson not just for Raimi and
company but for co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who here dub a correctional
facility “Hudsucker State Penitentiary” and make a blink-and-you-miss it cameo appearance
(Frances MacDormand plays a nun, too). So how’s the movie? Sometimes quite
entertaining, always exuberant, a bit of a mess, and an unexpected stylistic
link between Raimi, the Coens, and honestly, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Like the
Coens’ subsequent Raising Arizona, it’s
a real cartoon movie, although at this point Raimi has a slight edge in chops.
Still, never such innocence again and all that. And I bet Tarantino was a big
fan, for reasons you’ll get if you watch it yourself. The picture quality is
very good and will likely satisfy the recollections of the five people who
actually got to see this in its abortive theatrical “release.” The extras are
nicely explanatory overall but the jewel is of course the Bruce Campbell
commentary, because production train wreck tales are way more interesting than
success stories and because it’s the irrepressible Campbell telling them.
Speaking of Reed Birney, who got the lead role that Raimi wanted for him, Bruce
notes, “Reed’s pretty cute in this. I wonder why he didn’t work much after
this. I guess it’s because we destroyed his career.” He also refers to Louise
Lasser as “a piece of work.” Great stuff. —A

Day of the Falcon
(Image)

Every now and then I hear of a direct-to-DVD (more or less)
release of a film of the sort maybe that they don’t make anymore, and I kinda
get my Sentimental Old Man hopes up, like somehow I’m gonna be gifted with a
latter-day Khartoum or something that
will help me to banish dull care or something. This is particularly weird
because I don’t even like the actual Khartoum all that much.
Anyway, I thought maybe this
produced-by-some-obscenely-rich-Middle-Eastern-dude item, directed by
Jean-Jacques Annaud, might do some kind of trick in this realm, but alas, no.
It opens in “The Yellow Belt, somewhere in Arabia.” And boy, that belt sure is
yellow! The noble heads of warring factions come to an uneasy truce involving
one of the scions of a warlord living under the safekeeping of the former
rival, or something, setting the stage for an epic (not quite) series of
conflicts once the land of the Yellow Belt is discovered to be oil rich. The
disc looks very good, but the
visual splendor does not ameliorate a cliché-collection storyline and
script, po-faced direction that takes every cliché dead seriously, phoned-in
performances, and….well, the battle scenes take forever to get started, and
aren’t so hot once they do. I’m sticking with Khartoum. —C+

The Devil And Miss Jones (Olive)

Ah, Olive Films. Its Blu-rays of old Republic Westerns
(right, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute Republic Westerns) kept me sane when
I took breaks from grappling with The De Niro Perplex and other inerleckshul
challenges. And its off-kilter but hardly random selection of other vintage
Hollywood fare consistently uncovers gems of substantial cinephilic pertinence.
This 1941 Norman Krasna-scripted, Sam Wood-directed comedy is an excellent case
in point, a swell vehicle for the great Jean Arthur and an amusingly
agitationist pro-labor parable to boot, with Charles Coburn as a magnate who
conceives the concept for the later television series Undercover Boss, as it were. A crackerjack picture with a standout
sequence set in Coney Island, and a very interesting just-pre-World-War-II time
capsule (although there’s not a single allusion to the troubles in Europe at
the time). All this and production design by William Cameron Menzies. (Cogent, but a little on the
subdued side for him, although the Coney Island police station did give this
viewer an eerie little pre-echo of Invaders From Mars.) The Blu-ray is crisp looking, but a little lowish in the contrast
department, which I sometimes find to be the case with Olive. Hardly a cardinal
sin and in any event and the movie is well worth your time. —B+

Diary of a Chambermaid
(Olive)

Hollywood-studio bound Jean Renoir is frustrating in a lot
of ways, I noted as I began watching this, struck by the stage sets, and the
sometimes-Mickey-Mousing musical score. This ain’t no Toni, in other words. However. Once you’re accustomed to
the climate, the salient features of which include Paulette Goddard’s
incarnation as a blonde, the movie builds up a nicely sly and sardonic head of
steam. And of course this 1946 gloss on Mirbeau is an excellent double feature
with Buñuel’s 1964 treatment of the same material, starring a Jeanne Moreau
who’s permitted to keep her natural hair color. The cursory treatment Renoir
accords this picture in My Life and My Films tends to confirm my suspicions that this was more a
passion project for Burgess Meredith (co-star, co-screenwriter, co-producer,
and Goddard’s husband at the time) than the director himself. In any event, the
disc looks good, there’s a slight uptick in contrast relative to The
Devil and Miss Jones, and ostensibly minor
Renoir is still Renoir. —A-

From Beyond (Scream
Factory)

Barbara Crampton’s metamorphosis from bespectacled
researcher to leather corseted dom
is possibly the greatest sexy librarian switch in cinema history. And the
Stuart-Gordon-directed 1986 followup to the immortal Re-Animator doesn’t disappoint in its other particulars either.
The disc is first rate: Good detail, great psychedelic colors. Gordon’s brio
and the overall inspiration of the rest of the crew bring this latter-day
exploitation goodie way above generic Italian-studio Charles Band-dom.
(Longtime Fangoria and/or Video Watchdog subscribers know too well what I
mean.) Filmmaking lesson: various
gradations of psychedelic pink lighting definitely give your rubberized
creature effects a more convincing feel. Good explosions and fire, always a
sign of a well-done transfer. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “From
Beyond has a machine!” —A

Frontier Horizon
(Olive)

The good news is that this 1939 B oater, the eighth and last
Three Mesquiteers picture to star John Wayne, is the best-looking of all such
Blu-rays I’ve looked at thus far (I haven’t yet gotten to Santa Fe Stampede and Red River Range).
It’s one of the more unstuck-in-time Mesquiteers adventures, with an engaging
land-grab storyline and tight narrative margins and brisk action; a real tonic.
Also the film debut of Jennifer Jones, here billed by her real name Phyllis
Isley, and looking and acting very fresh, innocent as she is of the knowledge
that David O. Selznick would soon come along and CRUSH HER SPIRIT.—B+

The Fury (Twilight
Time)

This, as it happens, is one of my favorite Brian De Palma
movies, largely because it’s just the director going virtuosically nuts on a
B-movie “Don’t fuck with Kirk Douglas” scenario. For the first quarter or so I
was having a wonderful time with the high-def version. The beach scene with
William Finley, and its bizarre depth-of-field show-offery, looked amazing. And
I noticed that Hillary Thompson, the girl Amy Irving gives the nosebleed to,
was a dead ringer for Sasha Grey, who was not even a concept in 1978. This is
what movie watching’s all about. However. Once the night scenes started, the
picture got pretty wonky: a good deal of speckling akin to what one sees in the
Italian transfers of some Dario Argento pictures. It’s particularly evident in
a scene after Douglas puts Irving on the bus: the over-graininess doesn’t get
as bad as that of the misfire French Connection Blu-ray of a while back, but it’s close. Off-the-record consultations
with technically trusted sources suggests the problem arises from an anomaly of
an outmoded storage medium for digital transfers. It certainly didn’t kill the
movie but it took me out of it for a bit, and it’s a poor comparison with the
wonders inherent in the daylight scenes. A shame, and a problem I hope can be
corrected at some point in time. —C

The Grandmaster (Mei
Ah mixed region Hong Kong import)

If you wanna see the latest from Wong Kar-Wai before Harvey
Weinstein regales the U.S. with his shorter-by-fifteen-minutes cut, this pricey import would seem to be the way
to go, and it’s a beauty. An evocative and sometimes elliptical biography of
martial arts legend Ip Man (in case you were wondering, that’s the guy’s actual
NAME, not like a superhero title or anything) it begins with a rain-soaked
fight sequence that’s both quintessential and unlike anything the director’s
done before. The colors are quietly ravishing, the performers profoundly
enigmatic, and on the whole it’s more assured and cohesive than My Blueberry
Nights, which I’ve actually gotten fonder of in recent years. On this disc,
movie itself is region-free, and has English subs; special features are
region-locked, and have none. They look pretty EPK-generic, as far as I can
tell. Your call. —A-

The Grapes of Death
(Kino Lorber)

That’s a goofy title (and the French original, Les
raisins de la mort, isn’t much better) for
a genuinely remarkable horror movie, one of the most desolate films ever made,
its often goofy special effects notwithstanding. There’s something about
zombie-like pestilence occurring in the bucolic French countryside (Michael
Haneke exploited it for rather similar effect, in fact, for his more
arthouse-respectable [and also excellent] Hour of the Wolf) that just gets to you. Director Jean Rollin’s
determined simplicity alternates with genuine (blank verse0 poetry, and the
atmosphere of dread and despair is simply remarkable. Brigitte
Lahaie-aiie-aiie-aiie is great as a not-what-she-seems character and her
“behold my infection-free naked body” bit is a rather hilarious bit of exploitation
deadpan in an otherwise mordant vision. The disc looks spectacular, very true
to its source. Which source contains the aforementioned cheesy special effects,
but what are you going to do. —A-

The Grifters
(Miramax/Echo Bridge)

Ah, Echo Bridge, perpetrators of that wretched Blu-ray of Dead
Man back in 2011. How I dread the idea of
spending money on your product. So I think what happened is that I picked up
this (admittedly cheap retail price point) disc in a trade in, because my
curiosity got the better of me and also because damnit this is a pretty great
picture that belongs in one’s library and it has a Donald E. Westlake script
and naked Annette Bening and so there. Still, once it was home I didn’t look
forward to checking it out. It’s not bad. The opening credits are in 1.66,
which piqued my interest for a minute, but once they were through the picture
reverted to a plasma-screen-filling 1.77 (not even 1.85, those motherfuckers).
The picture’s solid, a little soft at times (like during Bening’s nude scene,
imagine that) but it doesn’t have any jump-out-at-you pixilation screw-ups as Dead
Man did. Not terrible, but also nothing
special. I’d recommend you shoplift it but what kind of person would that make
me?—B-

The Hobbit (Warner)

I don’t have full-time access to a 3D display, so I acquired
the flat Blu-ray of this, a movie I’d probably like a lot more if I smoked pot,
because I was curious about how a more conventional version would look—I saw it
on the big screen in 3D and at the controversial 48 fps projection speed and
was mixed but sometimes very impressed. The “regular” version on Blu-ray is
more…mixed. The textures of the visuals offers more disctrete distinction
between the live-action and animated components within a given frame that I was
comfortable with; the images rarely, if ever, merged into a coherent and
satisfying whole. Again, this might not have been a problem had I been watching
stoned. But I think the thing is, this movie actually needs 3D, if not necessarily 3D in 48fps.
Having figures inhabit different planes just makes the multi-platform effects
more digestible, as it were. Whenever I get a display upgrade (and it’ll
probably be a while), I’ll give the 3D version a look and report back. —B

The Hudsucker Proxy
(Warner Archive)

Almost ten years after their pal Sam Raimi got majorly
burned on Crimewave, the Coen Brothers
got a big budget and no studio interference on their own arguably final Full
Cartoon movie, their first effort to really take a bath at the box office, as
it happened. Like all Coen pictures, it’s since acquired a cult, but not nearly
the one that The Big Lebowski entertains.
And so, its Blu-ray gets a bare-bones Warner Archive release. Not that you go
to Coen Brothers movies on video for the DVD extras anyway. This movie looks
very nice; the disc nails the movie’s highly burnished look, which we come to
understand as but one function of its Dada-by-way-of-Preston-Sturges snideness.
By this time the Coens’ chops had come to match the ambition of their crazy
gags (if you watch Raising Arizona
today, while it’s still delightful, you might be shocked at how ragged some of
it looks), and with more money to throw at production design and such, they
really went to town. It’s kind of astonishing that the movie even exists. And
yes, I think Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance works. —A-

The Jazz Singer
(Warner)

One rather wishes that Michael Curtiz rather than Alan
Crosland had directed this 1927, um, breakthrough film, but what are you going
to do. It would have still retained its problem-picture status. What this
Blu-ray really demonstrates is how great a result is yielded via application of
expensive up-to-the-minute technology. I’m admittedly speculating here; I don’t
have the details of how this transfer was made but it simply has to be a
meticulous frame-by-frame scanning of good or eminently restorable materials.
Look at the whites of Warner Oland’s eyes when he pops them out in indignation
that Jakie is late to sing at temple. It’s incredible in a movie that’s almost ninety
years old. As good as the older movies Olive puts on Blu-ray can look, their
transfers are done by more conventional means, and it shows. The rest of this
package runs along the same lines as the 2007 standard-def release, with
multiple eye-popping hours of vintage musical entertainment, while the
commentary track on the movie itself from
Ron Hutchison and Vince Giordano is one of the best of its kind. Just
amazing. —A+

Knightriders (Arrow
Region B U.K. import)

I cannot tell a lie: until this Arrow release came under my
transom, I’d actually never seen this crucial George A. Romero film. I regret I
didn’t sooner; it’s a pretty spectacular film. And it’s really not nearly as
goofy as its conceit of stunt cyclists enacting Arthurian myth in the modern
world might strike you, in large part due to Ed Harris’ superb lead performance
and to the workmanlike, thorough way that Romero and his company enacts said
conceit. Expansive, emotional, but never sentimental, it’s a quintessential
Romero treatment on the wages of integrity. The transfer looks terrific, and
the extras, including a commentary and a contemporary interview with Harris,
are also excellent. Shout! Factory has this slated for a domestic release in
July but I’m not sure if the company will best this particular product.—A+

Leave Her To Heaven
(Twilight Time)

There has not been an extant Technicolor source for this
glorious Technicolor film since maybe before you and I were even born, which is
a shame and maybe even a crime. So as much restoration as it gets, we shall
never be able to behold the full glory of John Stahl’s mesmerizing 1945 plunge
into murderous neo-noir amour fou, starring Gene Tierney at her most
hypnotically ga-ga gorgeous. But this Blu-ray boasts a beautiful picture for
all that, so much more than passable that I wonder whether viewers of the real
Technicolor were struck by Stendhal syndrome en masse. Essential. —A+

Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles (Warner)

What a sort of random idea: a two-Blu-ray anthology of Looney Tunes mice-themed cartoons,
billed as “The Chuck Jones Collection.” The adventures of
Abbott-and-Costello-esque Hubie and Bertie are featured, as well as a bunch of
shorts featuring neurotically gabby Sniffles. While I grant that a little
Sniffles goes a long way, I also insist that in small doses he (she? it?) can
be kind of winsomely delightful. Aw, fuck it, I’m a complete sucker for Looney
Tunes on Blu-ray in any permutation, so maybe take my grade with a grain of
salt. But know also that the collection includes “Trap Happy Porky,” which has
that drunk-mice singing “On Moonlight Bay” and one of them hiccupping “You’re
flat” at the end, still one of the most reliably hilarious gags in all of
cinema, for my money.—A

Major Dundee
(Twilight Time)

The heroic-not-quite restoration of a too-much-messed-with
Sam Peckinpah coulda-been-a-masterpiece looked great in the standard-def
package released in 2006; this version looks better still. Even the 1965
Columbia opening logo has this particularity of grain that provides a Proustian
rush of movie-palace power. The reconstruction of Peckinpah’s vision is a movie
one wished one could have seen in precisely that context, because it would have
blown minds; it begins by coloring very deftly within the lines of the standard
Cavalry Western and grows progressively wilder and stranger while never
betraying its prime directive, so to speak. It’s also one of the most
emotionally stirring pictures of its kind. Cinephiles who are unconvinced by
claims for Peckinpah’s genius will at least have to credit him for a very
particular singularity of vision after seeing this. And in this format you need
make no excuses for the presentation.—A+

Monsieur Verdoux
(Criterion)

Speaking of strange, Charles Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy,
based on an idea of Orson Welles’, is one of the filmmaker’s odder creations,
the character a very upfront mix of self-love and self, if not loathing, then
some degree of disapproval. Verdoux is Barbe-bleu as bourgeois fallen on hard
times, as it were, his endeavors in murder slapstick cookies dipped in arsenic
and his exercises in restraint and/or compassion sentimentally
self-aggrandizing. Fascinating, to say the least. This is a good-looking but
not extraordinary rendering of the film—there’s apparently only so much that can
be done with the material available from the licensing agent. Nevertheless, a
necessary entry in the Cinema of Extraordinary Personality. And it’s pretty
funny, at least in parts, particularly those parts in which Chaplin jousts with
Martha Raye.—A

On Approval
(Inception)

No, I had never heard of it before either. Dave Kehr had, of
course Dave Kehr had, and it was his review of it in the Sunday New York Times
that convinced me to check it out. I’m very happy I did. The 1944
take-everyone’s-mind-off the war comedy (set in the Victorian era, it has a
present-to-past prologue that pokes gentle fun at the
torn-from-the-distressing-headlines pictures of its day) is pretty much a
fat-free puff pastry of droll dialogue exchanges in a Wildean mode, to wit,
“You have a sweet voice, Helen.” “Thank you, George.” “But you seldom sing.
That is a great accomplishment.” Reproduced in stellar, high-contrast black and
white, and supplemented by a dry but informative commentary from scholar Jeffrey Vance. Aside from featuring a rare film performance by British comedy
queen Beatrice Lillie, the wonderful movie happens to have been adapted, directed by, and starring Clive Brook,whom
you may remember as “Doc” Harvey from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. I had no idea he had it in him. —A

Pals of the Saddle
(Olive)

Another Mesquiteers title. No windowboxed opening this time.
A clear crisp image, not quite as
crisp as that of Frontier Horizon. I like it better than Frontier Horizon
though because it features kinds creepy quasi ventriloquist Max Terhune as
“Lullabye” Joslin, whom I find a more compelling (not to say Lynchian)
character than Raymond Hatton’s Rusty Joslin. Terhune’s character also indulges
in some merciless mocking of sap Tucson, played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan. It’s
also one of the Mesquiteer’s present-day-set adventures, and it involves a woman of initially ambiguous allegiances and the
smuggling of something that’s not quite uranium but is definitely meant to be.
Hence, the movie is Notorious avant la lettre, and hence cinematically important. Look, my point is that if you
don’t get your hands on every Three Mesquiteers western you can, you’re a bad
American. I don’t know how else to put it. —B

Panic In The Streets
(Fox)

Essentially a high-def clone of the Elia Kazan box set edition (note the menu, which is
designed in the style of the box set), but a really good looking version of
a masterful movie. As Kazan himself understood, this 1950 thriller was much
more than a genre exercise, but it works on that level just fine. It’s
thrilling filmmaking right from the get-go, with Kazan deploying genuine
locations and idiosyncratic performers (Zero Mostel has a major role in one of
his scarce films from this period before the blacklist kept him out of movies
for pretty much a decade) with remarkable energy and invention. The contrast is
just as I like it, the detail looks just fine to me. A couple of newer extras are added (docs on costars
Jack Palance and Richard Widmark), but the commentary from Alain Silver and James Ursini remains
the crucial one.—A

The Telephone Book
(Vinegar Syndrome)

This Blu-ray from a relatively new concern that seems
commendably concerned with unearthing and preserving unusual grindhouse and
quasi-underground fare does a nice job with this curio, written and directed by
Nelson Lyon, whose unfortunate subsequent claim to fame would be accompanying
John Belushi through a good portion of the Hollywood drug binge that killed the
performer. This not-quite-tale of a girl Candide’s search for the world’s
greatest obscene phone caller (no, really) boasts lovely vintage NYC locations
rendered in yummy black and white and features, not necessarily in this order,
Roger C. Carmel yelling “Fuck,” William Hickey contemplating a giant erection,
and Jill Clayburgh loading a gun while wearing a sleep mask. Producer Merv Bloch
provides a lively and sometimes sadly nostalgic commentary. Utterly intriguing
but not for everyone. —B+

Tess (BFI Region B
U.K. import)

One of Polanski’s greatest films, it’s rarely acknowledged
as such for reasons I’m not sure I ought to speculate on. So I won’t, and
instead will hope that this beautiful albeit extras-short Blu-ray from a
restored source will help find it a newish and appreciative audience. Yes, the
British countryside of Hardy, not to mention of Turner and Constable, is evoked via the ravishing cinematography (Ghislain Cloquet
took over for Geoffrey Unsworth after the latter died some weeks into shooting)
but the effects are not “merely” picturesque; the beautiful golden glow that illuminates “Sir John D’Urbeville”
throws that character’s strong ignobility into sharp relief, and throughout,
natural glory is undercut by human stupidity and/or cruelty. The director is at
his most expansive and his most crushing, simultaneously. —A

That Cold Day In The Park (Olive)

Pre-M*A*S*H Altman, but the purposeful murk of the imagery,
and the focus fakeouts
throughout, presage McCabe and
Mrs. Miller and Images and Three Women more than they do the subsequent film
that would make him famous. The movie got slagged as a squalid but conventional
psych thriller at the time but seen today its particular tetchiness is really
auteur-distinctive, if you ask me. The drab of the supposedly swank apartment
inhabited by the Sandy Dennis character speaks volumes. The Olive disc seems to
have been transferred from not pristine materials, but the Blu-ray renders what
is likely a pretty accurate account of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs’ long-lens
impressionism. Fun fact: after retiring from acting male lead Michael Burns
became an academic historian and has written more than one book on the Dreyfus
case. — B+

Tristana (Cohen)

Goddamn there are a lot of trailers before the beginning of
this movie. And that’s my only complaint. This high-def version of what I still
consider Buñuel’s masterpiece of masterpieces looks amazing right from the
beginning, as it casts a seemingly simple but ultimately devastating spell.
Kent Jones fortifies his reputation as The World’s Most Enviable Film Critic by
hosting a commentary track with Catherine Deneuve herself, and he keeps it relaxed
and gets great stuff. The included
alternate ending is interesting. The actual ending is…well, unbelievable. Get
this. Inspirational Commentary Bit: “He was really happy to be back in Spain,
to be back working in Spain.” —A+

Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics (Warner)

Good idea, putting these things on Blu-ray. The individual discs reproduce the extras, “Warner Night At The Movies” cartoons and shorts and all, of the standard def editions.
And we approve. As for the high-def picture quality, the films are, in backward chronological order: White Heat, which looks very nice; there's some crackle on the audio of the 1949 film, and one insert shot in the opening train robbery sequence kind of stands out like a sore thumb, but otherwise solid, terrific. The longest movie of the bunch, almost two hours, because it’s kind of surprisingly plotty. Never lags a minute though. 1936’s The Petrified Forest screened in a restored version recently, and I presume that’s what’s on this Blu-ray, because the picture is easily the sharpest and most consistent in the set (not that the others are considerably behind, mind you). I mean, you can see stray hairs pop off both Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s heads in medium closeup when they’re facing each other. Also the painted desert backdrops of the set are more evident. Terrific film, a bit on the talky side, but great performances (it made Bogart a star, but Howard really sells his slightly ridiculous role; the guy was some actor) and interesting action…and the two African-American characters are not broad stereotypes or even really stereotypes at all, a near-impossiblity for a Hollywood picture of this time, I used to think. The Public Enemy looks spectacular, sometimes grain heavy but what of it. Little Caesar displays a little softness in the shallow focus shots but it’s likely endemic to the material and it’s neither displeasing nor “bad.” A wonderful thing in all respects. —A+

Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning (Sony)

A lot of The Kids have been raving about this one (and I
gotta say that getting behind Peter Hyams’ son could be Vulgar Auteurism at its
most innovative), so I thought I’d check it out, despite the fact that I turned
off the similarly-praised The Raid after
about twenty minutes cause the thing looked as if it had been developed in a
mud bath. The first twenty minutes of this were really disgusting (slaughter of
lead character’s family in graphic detail, including much-teased adorable-little-girl
death), and looked pretty damn good. Eventually I thought I discerned a
pulpier, freaked-out extrapolation of The Bourne Legacy and/or Unknown, with
some intriguing Fire Walk With Me "touches."Eventually I had to own up to the
fact that I was being way too optimistic and that the movie really wasn’t about
much more than a guy who comes out of a coma to discover that he has a British
accent. This does have more nudity than an average Bourne knockoff, plus the
lead actress is a pretty credible Stoya lookalike. (Don’t hassle me for knowing
too much about porn stars, she was on the cover of the goddamn Village Voice.)
The action stuff is pretty credibly bone-crunching, I admit. The commentary is
the usual “we had a great second unit” stuff. Verdict: not as essential as you
may have been led to believe. —B-

The Vampire Lovers
(Scream Factory)

No real complaints from me on this one. Yeah, maybe the
materials weren’t pristine/super-restored, but they look decent. If there’s
ever a Blu-ray of Fearless Vampire Killers, I’ll expect it to look better. But, no disrespect to Roy Ward Baker
intended, the way this looks is both objectively good, and also entirely
appropriate to the movie’s aesthetic pay grade. Inspirational dialogue:
“German’s so difficult.” Among the extras: ten minutes of pasty but nicely
dressed white males trying to come up with more erudite ways to exclaim
“Boobies,” (because there sure are a lot of them in the movie, and most of the
guys saw the movie when they were at an impressionable age). On the other hand,
while the very sensible and nice and still lovely second female lead Madeline
Smith gives an interview my wife characterizes as “darling!” Commentary
features very sedate-sounding Ingrid Pitt, delightfully named screenwriter Tudor Gates, and the great Baker in a dry but
informative interview format. (All three are now deceased, which is lamentable
but inevitable.) —A

Van Gogh (Gaumont
Region B French import)

Gaumont’s been putting out the Pialat catalog in new
high-def editions and while I am sufficiently pleased by my current
Eureka!/Masters of Cinema standard-def editions of the films and I figure
eventually the company or some like concern will step up to the plate with
versions featuring English-language extras, in a couple of cases I have not
been able to resist. This 1991 picture is one. (It’s not among the MOC titles,
is one reason.) This is a magnificent film, an artist’s portrait of an artist
that concentrates on interstices, pauses, and work, work, work rather than the
usual romanticized “artiste” stuff. It’s kind of the ultimate act of respect to
its subject and likely a kind of self-portrait of its director. It looks sweet
throughout, though there are hints of noise in some of the darker scenes near
the end (for instance, Jacques Dutronc’s Van Gogh with a prostitute in the
Moulin Rouge back room). I hold out hope for cheaper, more
English-comprehensive editions (you’ve got subtitles on the feature but not on
any of the extras) but I’m still glad to own this. —A

The Verdict (Fox)

The long-awaited (by me and Jeffrey Wells and probably some
other people too) Blu-ray of the 1982 movie looks pretty splendid: a good
library copy of a movie that belongs in your library. Watching it this time
around I noticed for the first time that the relationship between Paul Newman’s
Frank Garvin and Jack Warden’s Mickey Morrisey rather neatly reverses the
dynamic between the Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O’Connell characters in
Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
Director Sidney Lumet often complained that critics didn’t really appreciate
the depth of cinematic craft he brought to his deceptively straightforward
storytelling; this movie is a master class in it. As Phillip Lopate put it in a
recent Cineaste review of the Blu-ray of Lumet’s film of A Long Day’s Journey
Into Night (which I haven’t gotten around to looking at yet), “If Lumet refuses
to disguise the theatricality of the source material, he brings an impressive
array of cinematic techniques to its moment-by-moment realization.” Where,
say, Preminger moved the camera,
Lumet likes to place it in a comprehensive overview position and keep it there
for a good long time (see the pretrial conference with Newman, James Mason, and
Milo O’Shea), but he then places his emphases via judicious cutting to
ground-level medium shots as the scene builds in verbal and strategic complexity.
In other words, he is rather like
a theater director in that his moves service the script, and this script, by
David Mamet from a novel by Barry
Reed, is a very strong one. One of the best by the director, the screenwriter,
and the star. —A+

Viva Zapata! (Fox)

I haven’t kept up on the critical reputation of this 1952
picture, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, and I have to say I was not that thrilled by it (and I
recall not having been too thrilled by it first time around, which must have
been when I was in my twenties). It looks beautiful; Joseph MacDonald’s lensing
of various parts of the North American west standing in for Mexico is inspired.
But I found it dramatically
stilted (John Steinbeck’s script wears its earnest didacticism on its sleeve)
and kind of a waste of Brando, who is very conscientiously consistent in his
portrayal of the plaster-saint version of the title character. This movie
immediately precedes another Kazan non-favorite of mine, Man on a Tightrope.
Maybe the guy was having personal problems in the mid-50s, I dunno. The disc is
a solid presentation to be sure.—B

Wake In Fright
(Alamo Drafthouse)

This highly disquieting 1971 thriller directed in Australia
by Canadian-born Ted Kotcheff could just as well be titled Alcohol Is A Hell Of
A Drug. A dissatisfied outback schoolteacher en route to Sydney makes a stop in
the so-called “Yabba” that, after a few beers and a few more after that,
submerges him in what we’ll call a distinctly unwholesome culture. Definitely a
movie you ought to show anyone who thinks the “Wolfpack” ethos endorsed by
those idiotic Hangover movies is something, you know, real. Also, you'll never see Donald Pleasance the same way again, even if you already do know Cul-de-sac. Long considered
lost, Wake was revived on the rep circuit recently and the Blu-ray from
relatively a new distrib outfit (an offshoot of the legendary Texas movie
venue) is highly admirable: a great transfer that really puts across that
baking-heat yellow light that seems endemic to Australia and certain Australian
films, and good extras. If you can stand the (multiply disclaimered) kangaroo
hunt that’s the movie’s horror centerpiece you’re golden. If not, well, you’ve
been warned here. —A

War of the Wildcats
(Olive)

Lest anyone accuse me of being completely in the tank for
any Republic western, I cite this 1943 relative dud, which is kinda dull
although arguably as semi-interestingly weird as one would expect any movie
that casts Albert Dekker and John Wayne as romantic rivals to be. Originally titled In Old Oklahoma, it
features Dekker and Wayne as two different types of oil men, one the rapacious
land-grabbing type, the other the hard-working man of the people. Guess who’s
which. Martha Scott plays the object of their affections, a former school
teacher turned early 20th-century chick lit purveyor. Nothing
against Scott, but Claire Trevor might have put more oomph in the role. Also
featuring Sidney Blackmer as Theodore Roosevelt. Seriously, it’s not as good as
I’m making it sound. And the disc presentation itself is quite mixed, what with
the frequent speckling of the source material. For Republic junkies only.—C

Zeta One (Kino
Lorber)

This 1969 secret agent/sci-fi pastiche looks pretty good.
GREAT colors. (Note the orange kitchen. If you watch it. Which I'm not recommending.) Whiter than white whites. Too bad it’s one
of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. INSIPID direction, coy dialogue, flat
delivery. Nice 60s art direction…I think my parents had those white swivel
chairs. The first scene goes on forever and nothing happens. It’s like The
Room of James Bond parodies, honest. But I
watched it all the way through! And the the image quality does hold up but man,
does this movie ever answer the question “How bad can it be?” And the answer
is: in the final shots, the At the end the hero is surrounded by six naked
and/or semi-clad women and he looks absolutely bored to death…and you completely
understand how he feels. Brilliant. —C+

Zombie Flesh Eaters
(Arrow Region B U.K. import)

This 1979, um, classic, looks pretty amazing, and you’ll
know a little about why from the interview I conducted with supervisor James
White, here. The clarity and detail is such I was able to cogently identify
(for my own self) the hallmarks of
The Lucio Fulci “Look:” Shallow focus, almost exclusively long lenses,
not ostentatiously lit, lotta “natural” light. And you know, maybe it’s my
grindhouse taste talking, but I think it’s a pretty good horror movie. And now
one word never associated with prior video versions can be applied to it:
beautiful. Nifty extras, too, including three different discrete title
sequences, ‘cause that how international distribution of Italian exploitation
cinema used to roll. —A+

May 23, 2013

I wish I could be somewhat less predictable but alas the day has come when I join thousands of other white heterosexual film reviewers of a certain age and say nice things about Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, in my review for MSN Movies. The extent to which I am being sarcastic when I commend it as a good date movie is up to you to decide. For the record, I haven't believed in "date movies" since I took Debra B. to see Eraserhead at a midnight show at the 3rd Street Playhouse (now the IFC Center) in late 1979 and she said it reminded her that she had to do her laundry. If you're interested in a dissenting voice on the Linklater, Richard Brody duzn't like it and he don't mind telling you.

May 21, 2013

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic, entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous.

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann.

May 16, 2013

Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine in Star Trek Into Darkness, for which I wrote a largely spoiler-free (although apparently the thing these days is to drop spoilers, and to care passionately, or something) review for MSN Movies. I liked it!

Also: I confirm my status as a member of a spider web of Noah Baumbach confreres who share his warped Manhattan/Brooklyn boho-bourgeoisie values by giving a positive review to Frances Ha. So sue me.

May 10, 2013

So. I've submitted the manuscript of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the editors at the book publishing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth's consideration of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has started a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or something, when the time is appropriate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that's pretty strictly formatted: General introduction, essays on ten films that encompass the whole of the performer's career until now, outro (or "Conclusion"), ten sidebars, and supplemental materials such as biographical chornology, filmography, and footnotes footnotes footnotes. But of course in writing about the ten individual films one does contextualize by discussing other movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man's work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer's Born To Win is actually worth your time if you haven't seen it already. After a little bit I started developing a slight resentment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two together on discovery that all of his tormentors throughout the cartoon have been Bugs Bunny in various disguises. "Everybody's turning into rabbits!" he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute "De Niro" for "rabbits" and you get where I was coming from. I won't go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage...well, as I said, I won't go into the details.

The book doesn't mention De Niro's personal life all that much, which was good for me given that the two De Niro biographies I worked with were highly problematic anyway; when I started this project I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is working on a proper De Niro bio, and I regret it wasn't available to me as it would have been an excellent resource. (See Shawn's superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you'll understand what I'm saying.) But given the extent to which certain of De Niro's career decisions have been affected by changes in his personal life, and by his increased visibility as a public person, and so on, some things are discussed. I'm not sure if I necessarily would have made room for a mention of the below discovery had I made it before finishing the book. Said discovery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a grocery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and-Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it generally plays vintage Blue Note fare on its sound system, which is nice. (And sometimes, as when the "free" section of Herbie Hancock's "Survival of the Fittest" came up on one Sunday morning, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncomfortable, and they're not sure whether admitting to their discomfort will make them seem unhip, and their psychic gyrations in this respect are a wonder to behold. Unless I'm just projecting. I could be.) It was in the coffee section. New among the offerings of Stumptown and Peet's and all these new concerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags contain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple package and on closer inspection discerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro.

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not.

Let's get into the coffee first. On opening, one encounters a pretty nice looking bunch of beans. I took a picture of those, too.

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife.

It's pretty fruity," My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear anyone say "fruity," I think of Mrs. Bates protesting to Norman about being displaced from her bedroom, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acidic sweetness to it. "Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?" My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a coffee connoisseur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I hadn't given the matter much consideration before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of coffee I've experienced in recent years was from a Honduran bean harvested by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven't been able to find another since. As it happens I'm not crazy about the fruitiness for which African coffees are renowned; I prefer something a little more robust. Although I'm extremely partial to the Tanzanian peaberry. I contain multitudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the coffee from the Rwandan bean that's the signature of Hightower's brand was bad. It's highly flavorful—complex, as the reviewers like to say. I could totally see it, personally, as a dessert coffee, if I was back on dessert.

The other salient feature of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the packaging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don't think that extended ampersand really works, frankly) and features a shit ton of copy. On one side there's copy that begins, "There is a place called Rwanda." On the other side a couple of paragraphs signed "Grace Hightower De Niro," beginning "We believe that doing good business means doing good for the communities in which we work." On the back, a sticker that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the package itself, an explanation of the "Signature Series." If all this copy doesn't keep you engaged while the coffee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feeling is that the people behind the product are going for the latter) there is of course a website for you.

I don't point this out to make fun. It's pretty clear this business idea emerged from a philanthropic impulse on Hightower's part, and a laudable philanthropic interest at that. What's interesting is the way that this enterprise so neatly slots into the contemporary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who's tried to get a business off the ground or publish a book or do something along such lines is invariably told that regardless of how strong your idea might be, it cannot be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the partner in a celebrity marriage that has already established its philanthropic bona fides, already has, it is universally acknowledged, a viable platform. Once that's established, the individual with the platform will be told that he or she needs to construct a narrative. This is regardless of whether the venture is charitable or profit-driven; narrative is all, even if it's made up. In Hightower's case, the possible narratives have deep roots in recent history and of course the chosen narrative is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related concerns about the ethics of coffee consumption. At least until the contrarian perspective on that starts coming into vogue, as it may be. (I read a headline somewhere the other day about how "foodies" were actually morally reprehensible, or something, but you know I almost never have been able to hear or read the word "foodie" without throwing up so I skipped the actual article.) Until then, if you're looking for a fruity and complex coffee that supports a growth industry in a particularly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower's brand a thumb's up.

May 07, 2013

From Harryhausen's unfinished Evolution of the World, late '30s to 1940. Featured on the indispensible DVD set Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection.

I cannot speak for everyone who fell in love with the movies at an early age. Still, it stands to reason that what enchanted us about movies in our tender years had little to do with the way that cinema could convey psychological nuance, or even necessarily how distinctively it could convey a story. No, what got us hooked, I think, was the movies' ability to show us things we'd never seen before, things we might have dimly imagined, or hoped, or dreaded seeing, but never actually laid eyes upon. The land of Oz. The sun going down on Tara. A twenty or, back in the day, forty-foot high snow globe. The Frankenstein Monster. An—impossible!—invisible man.

Ray Harryhausen himself would have been happy to tell you that it was the sight of a giant ape traversing and wreaking havoc on the streets of contemporary Manhattan that not only made him love movies but set him on his life's path. King Kong was the movie. Harryhausen was in his early teens when he first saw it. About fifteen years later, Harryhausen would work on the effects for Mighty Joe Young.

Harryhausen, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Ray Bradbury reconvene at L.A.'s Clifton's Cafeteria for a featurette for the Early Years DVD.

It is fascinating that Harryhausen's two closest childhood friends, Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, would themselves become ambassadors of the fantastic in the realms of magazines and literature respectively. The triumverate had an incalcuable impact on the pop imagination. What Harryhausen did with clay and plastic and a stop motion camera still constitutes the most dazzling and awe-inspiring body of visual effects a single filmmaker can lay claim to. Even once you knew the rudiments of how stop motion animation was done, what Harryhausen accomplished was unfathomable. The combination of his deep understanding of the frightening and the grotesque (as intuited via the Greek myths from which he drew so much inspiration), and his painstaking draftsmanship, and his literally saintly patience yielded cinematic miracles. The lack of a certain kind of seamlessness in the films that bear his work is in itself seductive, exhilarating. Watching Jason and the Argonauts, the introduction in a scene of a particular kind of visual degradation, the then-unavoidable result of matte work, is exciting, because it's a signal, a cue: an indication that some kind of mind-blowing effects sequence is about to begin. And then the skeletons start swordfighting with Jason and his men, and the consciousness of the matte work goes away; the action is brilliantly choreographed and completely mind-blowing, because you are convinced. Even if you intellectually know that these images are the result of one man making near microscopic movements on a miniature model and taking a still shot of each one, and keep reminding yourself of that, you can't not believe that you are watching living skeletons swordfighting. They're the stuff of nightmares, as are the harpies who torture Phineas in that picture; and yet there'a also a guiltily giggly kick to watching these demonic manifestations. Just as the alien craft demolishing the Jefferson Memorial and more in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers nails the ecstasy of destruction in a precise, painstaking way that subsequent hypertrophied derivations such as Independence Day never, ever could, not just because of the differences in technology but because of a lack of genuine personal investment. Harryhausen understood the things that we secretly wanted to see and made them happen with his hands and his fingers and his lights and his camera. He was the not-so-secret sharer of every kid who ever skipped his or her homework over the course of a week and instead spent the time getting that Aurora model of the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemare assembled just right. And we knew his name because Forrest J. Ackerman told us about him in Famous Monsters magazine, and because Ray Bradbury wrote "The Fog Horn," and because Bradbury's friend the other Ray took the minimally (albeit beautifully) described monster of Bradbury's story and made him into The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

It's so easy to bring to mind the formidability of his creations that one may momentarily forget their wit. Recall the giant not-quite-chicken of Mysterious Island. (And delight in the fairy tales collected on the self-published Early Years DVD collection.) And let's not forget the humanity of Mr. Joseph Young himself, Harryhausen's tribute to the pathos that his master Willis O'Brien brought to both Kong and the son of Kong. Harryhausen lived a rich, long life, and he left a magnificent record of it for his fans, including a remarkable book (An Animated Life), in which the detailings of how he made his incredible visions only enhances their impact when the movies themselves are re-viewed.

My friend Joseph Failla will be contributing some reminiscences and thoughts later.

UPDATE: From the February 2004 issue of Premiere, Joseph Failla's review of the DVDs of Beast, The Valley of Gwangi, and The Black Scorpion. Joe presented the issue to Harryhausen in person at a Lincoln Center event that year.

The Movies: Watching the onscreen legacy of student and mentor can be a rewarding experience; when that student is genius animator Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts) and his mentor the great Willis O'Brien (King Kong), the event becomes extraordinary. That's precisely what's offered with the releases of these three fine examples of the art of stop-motion animation in the giant-monster-and-mass-mayhem-movie-tradition. One comes away with the sensation of seeing life's creation on screen, rather than it's destruction - no matter how dark the fantasy turns.

With Beast (1953), Harryhausen ushers in the first of the atomic monsters in what is his answer of sorts to Kong, the film that changed the course of his life. In this case it's the Rhedosaurus, a dinosaur more than a 100 million years old, released from it's Arctic hibernation by a military blast, that makes it's way through the ocean currents to it's natural stomping grounds- downtown Manhattan! Based in part on Ray Bradbury's short story "The Fog Horn", it's pretty much the blueprint for the monster cycle that would dominate the scene for the next decade or so.

The Black Scorpion (1957) has O'Brien calling the special-effects shots. While it tells the familiar story of giant arachnids running amuck through modern day Mexico, it unexpectedly unleashes the most nightmarish model work seen in the entire genre (one could believe these slimy spiders, worms, etc. had crawled out of the infamous pit on Kong's Skull Island). Topping Them! with its primal fear factor and looking forward to the battlegrounds of Starship Troopers, Scorpion is a rare example of the genre running headlong into the horrific imaginations of it's creators, with spectacular results. This trio comes full circle with The Valley of Gwangi (1969), Harryhausen's loving tribute to O'Brien- a production of one of the master's unrealized project's. Again referring back to Kong (or Mighty Joe Young) with more than mere suggestion, Gwangi is another tale of adventurers bringing back their monstrous quarry to civilization for fun and profit. Only this time the worlds of cowboys and dinosaurs are melded into a kind of prehistoric rodeo show. The genres play together better than expected; after all, it's one big fantasy designed to cater to one's childlike instincts, although there's nothing juvenile about it.

The dinosaur effects on display this time are some of the most exciting and complicated yet seen: These "big lizards" have personality and actually give performances, which separates this from much of the advanced techno work achieved today. It took the creation of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—with the help of an actor and a team of computer artists—to equal the results that Harryhausen and O'Brien got on their own.

The Discs: In an appropriate move on Warner's part, each film is accompanied with extras that enrich the viewer's perception of its art. Beast offers recollections of longtime pals Harryhausen and Bradbury (whom you never saw so disarmingly delightful) expressing their joy at still being kids at heart and at the thrill that only comes from a lifelong love affair with the fantastic. Gwangi brings us testimony and accolades from some of today's technical wizards, whose works would be unthinkable without these pioneering animators.

And here's Failla's review of The Early Years, from the May 2005 Premiere, headlined "Everybody Loves Raymond:"

The formative years in the career of an artist is laid out before us in RAY HARRYHAUSEN: THE EARLY YEARS COLLECTION (Sparkhill, $29.95), the missing piece of a creative picture that, besides providing delight in and of itself, helps illuminate the better-known work of the legendary stop-motion animator. While Harryhausen is best known for his stunning visions in the likes of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts, these animated shorts, educational films, and unfinished dream projects show us for the first time the progressive process by which Harryhausen was able to feed his imagination into our own.

This two-disc set presents the archived work (all in excellent, restored condition) that started his long career. Beginning with the Mother Goose Stories series and several Fairy Tale shorts (originally produced for screenings in schools in the late '40s and early '50s), Harryhausen combines his unmistakably proficient animation skills with child-friendly storytelling. Uncannily, the viewer is drawn to the lifelike qualities Harryhausen imbues his characters with, as well as the ever expanding fantasy world they inhabit. Of these, it's The Tortoise & the Hare that most will regard as the crown jewel of these treasures. By far the most ambitious, this short was discarded, incomplete for many years. Fortunately, with the help of a new generation of stop-motion specialists, Harryhausen was recently able to "finish" the film. The results are a seamless flow of old and new footage with Harryhausen's spirit running through each frame.

Digging deeper into the disc's many pleasures, we come across some of Harryhausen's most intriguing prospects in the form of experimental tests and fragments. His very early dinosaur footage is painstakingly detailed in the manner of his future mentor Willis O'Brien's work on King Kong. Harryhausen's Elementals (a giant batlike creature's attack on Paris!) sticks in the mind among the various scintillating remnants as an unfortunate missed opportunity. Still, all of it is great to see now.

Peter Jackson and James Cameron are among those stepping up in the second disc to acknowledge their debts to Harryhausen. What makes all this so special is that he himself is still around, not only to appreciate the tributes, but to explain in his own words his long journey from inquisitive youth with a single-frame camera, to the most revered figure in special-effects history. His continuing enthusiasm is exquisitely conveyed in a reunion segment with Harryhausen and his longtime pals Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman as the three relate tales of a lifelong friendship bonded in a mutual love of fantasy and fiction. To hear the famous trio speak as if they were kids once more is not only moving but what this disc is all about.

May 03, 2013

I wasn't all that crazy about Iron Man 3, but my friend Tom Carson really liked it. I point this out not because it's so rare that Tom and I disagree—we disagree, at times avidly, about a lot of stuff. What I did find interesting is that, if you look at both reviews (of which Tom's is the better and more tightly written), you don't get that "did those two even see the same movie?" sense of disconnect. It's pretty clear we did see the same movie, and came to some of the same conclusions about it. It's more that for Tom the interesting stuff wasn't overwhelmed by the bombast, while for me the bombast wiped all the interesting stuff away. Tom's response to the movie remained enthusiastic through the bombast, to the extent that he was better able to take in what it was signifying, whereas my unconscious inclination was to stop giving the movie the benefit of a doubt at every turn that pissed me off. I don't know if seeing it in a different frame of mind, or maybe from a different seat, would have made a difference.

Also, I was maybe a little kinder to Xan Cassavetes' Jean Rollin rip Kiss of the Damned than I might have been, had I not been a Rollin fan to begin with myself. I suppose maybe I ought to be crankier about the fact that a taste for Rollin was once regarded as a psychological anomaly, and is now apparently an emblem of exquisite hipster connoisseurship. I might take it up with my therapist, except she'll have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about.

May 02, 2013

I have a rather amusing, I guess, conflict that made it questionable for me to write about this movie in a professional context, which is that a very dear friend of mine in real life is portrayed as a character therein. Frank Wood, a stage actor of good repute, portrays the musician Gary Lucas, who I got palsy pal-sy with after reviewing a show of his in the late 1980s, God help me. I was not present at the Arts At St. Ann's concert that provides this fictionalization of a crucial point in the life of the late Jeff Buckley its climax, but I certainly knew about it, and I was around Gary and Buckley a bit during the latter's brief tenure in Gary's still-extant banc Gods and Monsters. Dan Algrant's movie juxtaposes scenes from the purposefully rootless life of Jeff Buckley's legendary cult-musician father Tim Buckley against a depiction of Jeff's trip from California to New York at the behest of the St. Ann's concert's organizers.

Movies about the broken bonds between fathers and sons are getting to be a thing with filmmakers of a certain generation nowadays, and Greetings From Tim Buckley is a rare one in that it didn't make me want to puke blood. In fact it is quite good, and one reason it's quite good, in my book, is something I've seen other critics give it a hard time about. The movie is content to let its characters breathe in their environments, and do what they do, and it never attempts to hammer a nail on which to hang their motivations. Which isn't to say it doesn't give you dots to connect. But I was actually fairly relieved, say, that the Tim Buckley depicted in this film (and nicely played by Ben Rosenfield) is never obliged to sit down and deliver a speech about why he's an absentee dad to his infant son. The character's behavior in an early scene, in which he detours into the desert on a road trip to a gig he's likely to be very late for as a result, does a pretty good job of encapsulating the restlessness that guided not just his behavior but his music. Similarly, the quiet exasperation that Penn Badgely's Jeff conveys as everyone he meets in New York immediately tells him how much he looks like his dad and then ignores him is quiet, full of impliction. Hints are dropped here and there by other characters about the kind of music Jeff had been involved with in California, and its disconnection from the spacey, jazz-inflected folk that his dad pioneered; but the feelings of alienation and eventual resolution are conveyed via the spaces the characters inhabit, and the spaces between them. In the vision concocted by Algrant with his co-screenwriters, David Brendel and Emma Sheanshang, confronting and then embracing the shadow cast by his father becomes Jeff's way of finally stepping out from under it. The character's conflicts get summed up pithily; while Jeff insists he can sing rings around his dad, there's also the fact that at the age Jeff was when he turned up for the St. Ann's concert, Tim had made some of his best and most enduring music.

Once these points are established, Algrant takes his time. Imogen Poots' concertmasters' helper character initially threatens Manic Pixie Dream Girl-hood, but her moody tentativeness gives her a dimension that plays well off of Jeff's what-am-I-doing-here suspension. Wood's version of Lucas is that of a bluff show-me-what-you-got pro who turns quasi-mentor. There's a neat bit where Lucas mentions to Buckley that he should put a lick he just sang "into one of your dad's songs" and Lucas registers the young singer's discomfort; and the scene in which Gary plays Jeff the instrumental that would become "Grace" is one of the better depictions of musical communication I've ever seen in any movie.

I haven't been crazy about Algrant's other pictures (and I suppose it bears disclosing that the director and myself both acted in the same film a few years ago, although we've never properly met), so I was kind of unprepared for the spare and genuinely poetic feel of Greetings From Tim Buckley. And its ballsy but not ostentatious bucking of standard biopic tropes. I was really taken with it; I think it's one of the outstanding movies of the year so far.

Now, does it depict how stuff really "went down?" I couldn't tell you entirely, and even if I could, the answer would still likely be "Yes and no." I was talking to Gary about it and I asked him, "You weren't rocking the hat back then, were you?" Like myself a connoisseur of hair loss, Gary in recent years has made a borsalino part of his presentation, but no, during his collaboration with Jeff he was going au naturel. Also, Gary in real life was a lot more immediately impressed with Jeff. As for myself, I thought Jeff was a great singer—how could you not—but in my admitedly rather limited interactions with him, I also found him a bit of a jerk, for lack of a better word. Once he embraced the fact that he was gonna be the most charismatic guy in the room 999 time out of a thousand, he embraced it with a vengeance, let's say. In any event it doesn't matter; Algrant has taken the real life bits, including a lot of wonderful music, and created a story of his own that's smart, engaging, and unexpectedly resonant. You should see it.